Nov 16 Shooting Dragons in the Dark: A Night in the Zoo

There is a pretty amazing exhibit on in Dublin Zoo at the moment. The “Wild Lights” experience, is an art show of sorts, featuring animal shaped lanterns which are all around the zoo, mimicking a real zoo experience, only in lights. The artwork was created by a group of china artists, and is really something to behold. My wife and I recently paid a visit to see the exhibit and it was amazing.

To shoot some photos of the displays while I was there I brought my trusty X-Pro2. I didn’t really do anything fancy with it. I set the ISO to 6400 and everything else was pretty much on auto. I used the 18-55mm lens, usually wide open. The thing that became apparent after the first few attempts at shooting the lights was that the power frequency was an issue. I was getting images with only half the lights visible, as the frequency of the electricity was resonating with the frequency of the shutter and the camera to miss the lights.

I could have tried lowering the shutter speed which would have saved it, but I wanted to keep the images sharp, but instead I just shot bursts. Because the effect was kind of rolling, by shooting in bursts I made sure at least one of them was fully lit. I’m sure some people will think that this was a terrible way to go about the, but anyway. It worked, and at the end of the day, it’s the result that matters.

For editing, I did…well…nothing. These were all Jpegs straight from the camera. I imported the images into Photos and exported them again. That’s pretty much it. Incidentally, I did try opening the raw files in Capture One, and they were a bit sharper and with more detail, but I’m happy enough with the results from the Jpegs, so I left them at that.

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